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Browsing Library by Subject "Academic librarians--Faculty status"

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    Less money, less children, and less prestige: differences between women and men academic librarians
    (Elsevier, 2021) Eva, Nicole; Le, M. L.; Sheriff, John
    Academic librarianship is a heavily feminized profession, with women making up between 72-74% of the workforce based on statistics from Canada and the US (American Library Association, 2012; Canadian Association of University Teachers, 2017). As a result, gendered issues such as salary discrepancies and a glass ceiling phenomenon might be expected to be magnified in such an environment. The authors analyzed linked data from a 2018 census of academic librarians to uncover and examine the experience of motherhood and librarianship, specifically by looking at potential connections between gender, salary, number of dependents, and academic rank. Results demonstrate that women earn, on average, $10,000CDN/year less, are less likely to become a parent as their career progresses, and are overly represented at the lower ranks (e.g., Assistant Librarian) than their men counterparts. Drawing upon the literature on motherhood, salary differences, and career progression in academia, we demonstrate that issues long standing in the profession have yet to be resolved.
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    Opening the book on academic librarians: an agenda for investigating gender and professional status in a feminized profession
    (2005) Jacobs, Leona; Mellow, Muriel
    Librarians, as an occupational group, appear to have received surprisingly little attention from those who study work and gender. Like other feminized occupations, such as midwives and nurses, this group is of interest for how they have engaged in a project of professionalization in recent decades. Academic librarians have faced challenges to fully realizing a professional status because of their traditional organizational position as helpers or handmaidens to the professoriate. In order to more thoroughly outline a research agenda for examining this occupational group, this paper will present a review of the literature on the organization of librarians’ work from a sociological and library science perspective, using Sociological Abstracts and Library Literature to identify resources. The co-authors on this paper contribute their individual expertise by examining the literature that emerges from their respective disciplines and by entering into a cross-discipline discussion that will articulate the potential theoretical and practical outcomes of such a research agenda.